Wednesday, 30 September 2015

Have You Heard of The Great Forgetting? It Happened 10,000
Years Ago & Completely Affects Your Life

The Great
Forgetting refers to the wealth of knowledge that our culture lost when we
adopted our new civilized lifestyle. The knowledge that allowed indigenous
cultures to survive, the knowledge that we had once also been tribal and the
understanding that we were but one mere culture of thousands. All of this
disappeared in a few short generations.

The Great
Forgetting accounts for an enormous cultural collapse as once tribal people
found themselves in a new and strange mass centralized society. New beliefs,
new ways of life rushed into this cultural vacuum to fill the void. But without
being tested by natural selection over thousands of years this new culture was
evolutionarily unstable.

It is only recently
that the Great Forgetting has been exposed. Understanding it holds the key to
making sense of our destructive culture. And remembering what it is that was
forgotten holds the key to our future.

How The Great Forgetting Took Place

It began
around 10,000 years ago when one culture in the Near East adopted a new way of life
that humans had not tried before.

They began
to practice an intensive form of agriculture which enabled them to live in a
settled location.

They
developed large food surpluses which led to a population and geographic
explosion. What began as farming communes eventually turned into villages, then
into towns, and then kingdoms. Civilization began.

But it was a
long time before anybody began to write down history, several thousand years
later in fact. What happened in between was that the people of this culture
forgot what had happened. They forgot that they once were hunter gatherers and
foragers who lived a nomadic lifestyle. They assumed that mankind arrived on
the planet at the same time as civilization. They assumed that civilization and
settled agriculture was the natural state of mankind, as natural as living in a
herd and grazing is to buffalo.

Naturally
this gave rise to the belief that we were only a few thousand years old,
that mankind had began when civilization began.

The
primitive cultures that lived on the fringe areas of early civilization would
appear to suggest that humans had lived another way. But they were easily
explained away. They had fallen from the natural state of civilization; they
had degraded into savagery. They had once lived as fully fledged humans but
they had forgotten the way and now they were inferior, they were sub-human.

The Philosophical Roots of Our Culture

This
collective cultural memory lapse; this belief that humans had arrived in the world as
civilization builders was held by the foundation thinkers of our culture.

The
philosophers, historians and theologians of the ancient civilizations: Sumer,
Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, India and China wove the Great Forgetting into their
work.

Those that
followed – the Hebrew authors of the Bible, Moses, Samuel, Elijah, Isaiah and
Jeremiah, the great Western thinkers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and the
great Eastern thinkers Lao Tzu, Gautama Buddha and Confucius - all wove
the Great Forgetting into their work.

The thinkers
of more modern times also followed suit, they didn't take any Great Forgetting
into account. Why would they? They had no reason to believe that humans had not
come into this world as civilization builders. They had no reason to believe
that this wasn’t our natural state. So Thomas Aquinas, Francis Bacon, Galileo
Galilei, Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes carried on our culture with the Great
Forgetting at its root.

The Truth Is Revealed

Palaeontology
exposed the Great Forgetting. Palaeontology made it clear that mankind had not arrived
on Planet Earth when civilization emerged. We had lived for a very long time,
millions of years in fact, in a completely different way. Mankind hadn’t fallen
from the natural state into primitive living. That was how we began.

Looking back
on it one could assume that the exposure of the Great Forgetting would have
been a momentous discovery. It should have shook the very foundations of our
way of thinking, the very foundations of our culture. One could have assumed
that this would have led to some fundamental changes about who we are and how
we should live.

But it
didn’t. The Great Forgetting just got explained away. Instead of admitting that
two very different and legitimate ways of living had been adopted by mankind in
his history the thinkers of the 19th Century came up with this: man may have
been born into this world as a primitive savage but he was destined to become a
civilization builder.

In essence
they said: “Who cares that we didn’t arrive as a civilization builder. It was
our destiny to become a civilization builder. Now that we are here who cares
what went before us. Those people that lived before us were just a precursor to
us. They weren’t important.”

We
didn't arrive as a civilization builder. But it was our destiny to become one.

The
historians came up with a convenient way to disregard those humans that walked
the earth those millions of years before our culture emerged.

Instead of
accepting that they were part of history the historians relegated them to
pre-history. They were before history, because history began when civilization
began. We are the good stuff; we are the ones who are fulfilling the destiny of
mankind. We are the ones who should be studied.

The Myth of the Agricultural Revolution

Our
culture’s transition from hunter gatherer to civilization builder was also
explained away.
The term our thinkers coined was “The Agricultural Revolution.”

This is how
it was explained: Before the agricultural revolution humans didn’t know how to
farm or how to practice any kind of agriculture. They lived as hunter gatherers
and foragers. Once they discovered farming they were then able to settle down
and build civilization. The agricultural revolution was the foundation from
which all the greatness of humanity stems.

It was
explained in such a way that leads us to believe that the agricultural
revolution was:

Something that happened more or
less by everybody.

Something that happened more or
less at the same time.

The story is
told so we think that one group of people figured it out and those nearby saw
what they were doing and thought “aha what a better way of doing things, what a
better way of living.” Once a group was enlightened with the knowledge of
agriculture they immediately stopped their primitive hunting and gathering ways
and settled down to practice the better way. They could see that this was man’s
destiny and they eagerly took it up.

This myth
has permeated our culture since the 19th century thinkers created it to support
their idea that civilization is the divine destiny of mankind. However the
agricultural revolution was not a revolution and it had absolutely nothing to
do with agriculture.

Agriculture
had been practiced in many different ways and forms by thousands of different
cultures around the globe. Agriculture is not unique to civilization. What is
unique to civilization is a particular form of agriculture, that Daniel Quinn
terms totalitarian agriculture.

The
Agricultural Revolution had absolutely nothing to do with agriculture.

Totalitarian
agriculture subordinates all life forms to the relentless single minded
production of human food. It is the belief that the whole world is ours by
right and we should turn all of the land into human food.

This
generates huge surpluses which generates rapid population growth and rapid
geographical expansion.

Through
sheer weight of numbers totalitarian agriculturalists overrun neighboring
regions obliterating other cultures and their way of life. The agricultural
revolution wasn't something that started and finished thousands of years ago.
It is still happening today, being driven forward by our cultural doctrines
which tell us that the earth is a foe that must be conquered.

The
agricultural revolution wasn’t about humans finding a better way to live. It
was about a single culture out of thousands beginning to live in a way that
only worked through exponential growth. Civilization didn’t spread because it
was a good idea. Civilization spread through force. The exponential growth of
the totalitarian agriculturalists displaced anybody and everybody else. It
wasn’t a revolution; it was an experiment that became a runaway train.

So when the
Great Forgetting was exposed it was quickly covered up. Our culture went from
believing this:

The
realization of the Great Forgetting gives us a fresh perspective on human history and
our place in the world. It gives us the opportunity to see that another way of
living legitimately existed on this planet.

The answer
to this ecological
crisis doesn’t lie with bumbling along the same way we have been
trying to perfect for ten thousand years. It doesn’t lie with manically trying
to fix a way of life that can only succeed by growing. Eventually it was going
to grow so big that it would run out of room to keep going. That time has
arrived now.

Instead of
trying to tweak and change our lifestyle to somehow make it work we need to
have a complete overhaul of the way we live.

Now we can
study indigenous cultures and say they haven’t degraded into savagery.

They haven’t
been left behind in the march to progress; they aren’t the most undeveloped
peoples of civilization.

They live in
a way that is completely different to us.

A way that
is not inherently inferior and a way that is in no means a precursor to
civilization. Now we can look on them with fresh eyes, with newfound respect
and listen to what they have to say.

They have
lived sustainably on this planet for millions of years. We have much to learn
from them.

We can now
see that with the ecological crisis the problem is not humankind. Humans are
not parasitic. Humans can and have lived sustainably. The problem is a single
culture. The culture that began 10,000 years ago with totalitarian agriculture
and still practices it today. We don’t have to change humans. We don’t have to
fix them. We just have to abandon a single destructive culture.

We aren’t
99% of the world’s population because we have a better way of living. We are
99% because our culture grew and displaced those who didn’t need to grow.

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Tuesday, 29 September 2015

The first Panama Canal and the first Suez Canal were built
by the Chinese and the Egyptians

by
Gavin Menzies

Some months
ago we started serious research into the DNA of the native Indian peoples of
North America.
This quickly threw up a mystery: why were there so many clusters of
Indian peoples on the borders of Panama, Ecuador and Colombia – no less than
nine different peoples – who had DNA with such strong affinities to the Chinese
and Japanese? Obviously Chinese and Japanese seafarers had settled in those
areas – but why choose such an inhospitable country where there appeared little
opportunity for trade compared with the rich Maya civilisation further north or
the Incas further south? Why settle in the jungle?

Either side
of the Atrato River (which flows from south east Panama into the Caribbean
have DNA which Professor Gabriel Novick and colleagues have summarised as
follows: “Close similarity between the Chinese and native Americans suggests
recent gene flow from Asia”. The same can be said of Professor Novick’s
description of the Guambiano and Ingano peoples who live nearby where the Rio
San Juan reaches the Pacific. The people who live either side of those two
rivers – the Nganama/Wanana – “are clustered closer to Japanese people than to
other American natives” (Fideas E Leon S and colleagues).

Professor
Fideas E Leon S and colleagues also found that some 200 miles further south
“the Cayapa or Chichi from Ecuador [have genes] molecularly similar to those
found in south east Asian and Japanese people”. Professors Tulio Arends and
Galengo studied “the occurrence in transferins in 91 Yupa Indians, 69 of whom
belong to the Pariri tribe and 22 to the Shaparu tribe. They inhabit the
foothills of the Sierra Perija (latitude 9o to 110 north, longitude 720 40’ to
730 30’ west)…”

“In 58 per
cent of the Yupa Indians of Venezuela there is a slow moving transferin
electrophoretically indistinguishable from that which to date has only been
found in Chinese. This finding is additional evidence of the existence of a
racial link between South American Indians and Chinese.”

In short,
between Lake Maracaibo (which can be clearly identified on maps such as the
Cantino published before Europeans reached that part of America) and the
estuary of the Rio San Juan there are fourteen Indian peoples who have Chinese
or Japanese genes – a discovery made by seventeen dedicated geneticists.

When the
first Europeans arrived in that part of the world they found coconuts planted
along the Pacific coasts and on islands off the coasts – coconuts being plants
which originated in the Far East. They also found Chinese ship dogs and Chinese
rice. Drake captured a Chinese junk trading between North and South
America whose pilot had a chart showing the Pacific. Taking all this
evidence in the round, it seems to me inescapable that the Chinese and Japanese
lived in this small part of the Isthmus of Darien and created settlements there
before the first Europeans arrived – for, as mentioned in earlier talks, the
first Europeans found Chinese people already settled on the Pacific coasts of both
North and South America. The puzzle is, why should this be?

A clue may
be obtained, as always, from medieval maps, which were published before
Europeans reached the Pacific coasts of North America, notably the
Waldseemueller. To my mind, the Waldseemueller accurately charts the Pacific
coast of North America from 500 north right down to the approaches to the
Straits of Magellan in the southern part of South America. Perhaps even more
interesting, the Waldseemueller chart, which was published in 1507, does not
show the Straits of Magellan – this chart was available for the public at large
to purchase. However, smaller globes which Waldseemueller produced at the same
time for his private client, do show the Straits of Magellan. So before
Magellan set sail Waldseemueller knew the Straits of Magellan existed. As
mentioned earlier in another talk, Magellan also had seen a chart of the
Straits of Magellan in the King of Portugal’s library before he set sail on his
circumnavigation of the world. He referred to that chart when he was passing
through the Straits of Magellan.

The
Waldseemueller also showed an opening between the Atlantic and Pacific at 80
north – that is, the latitude of the southern parts of the Isthmus of Darien
where there is this cluster of Indian peoples who have Chinese and Japanese
DNA. Pedro Menedez de Aviles, the first Castilian viceroy of Florida, believed
that there was a canal which linked Pacific and Atlantic, for he found the
wrecks of Chinese junks off the coast of Florida and stated that these could
not have been there unless there was a passage similar to the Straits of
Magellan. His biographer, Carlos Prince reported, “Chinese . . . with Tartairs,
Japanese and Koreans . . . crossed the maritime stretch into the kingdom of
Quivira, populating Mexico, Panama, Peru and other eastern countries of the
Indies. In short, taking these reports together with the Synopsis of Evidence
on my website, www.1421.tv reveals a mountain
of evidence which corroborates what Carlos Prince said – Chinese, Japanese and
Koreans did indeed populate Panama, as is evidenced by the DNA of today’s
people.

The Geography of the Darien Peninsula

The Colombian-Pacific coast region (Choco) occupies a stretch between eastern
Panama and northern Ecuador between latitudes 80 45’ north and 10 15’ north and
longitudes 790 to 76 0 15’ west, a stretch of land between the
Pacific Ocean and Cordilllera Occidentale of the Andes, from west of the mouth
of the Atrato River near Panama to the border of northwest Ecuador.

The region
is lowland with elevations rarely exceeding 600 metres. It has a complex of
vast river basins, the most important being the Atrato and San Juan. Alluvial
plains extend along these valleys and empty respectively into the Caribbean Sea
(Gulf of Uraba – which appears on the Cantino) and the Pacific Ocean. And since
these two rivers parallel the Cordillera Occidentale and receive numerous
Andean subsidiaries, for much of the year they are swollen torrents. The San
Juan River discharges more water into the Pacific than any other American river
and the Atrato is the second-largest river in South America in terms of the
volume of water discharged into the Atlantic.

The lower
part of the Atrato basin is characterised by swamps and shallow lakes in
contrast to much of the San Juan River. Bordering both the Atrato and San Juan
rivers are wide belts of hills. Because of this geography the Choco area is
probably the wettest sizeable region on earth with various parts receiving
annual precipitation of 4 to over 9 metres. The Atrato which runs north into
the Caribbean, and the Rio San Juan which runs south into the Pacific, both
rise at the Bocca de Raspadura less than five miles apart. About 100 years
before the Panama Canal was opened to ship traffic, cartographers showed a
canal here, which they called the Atrato Canal on their maps of the world. The
canal supposedly had been in existence since 1788. It was then called the
Raspadura Canal and linked the San Juan and Atrato Rivers. The claim to have
told the outside world of the existence of this Raspadura Canal came from the
famous German scientist and geographer, Baron Alexander von Humboldt. Here is
his note:

“…The interior
of the Province of Choco, the small ravine Raspadura unites the neighbouring
sources of the Rio San Juan and the small river Quito (a tributary of the
Atrato). A monk of great activity, a curé of the village of Narita, employed
his parishioners to dig a small canal in the ravine de la Raspadura, by means
of which, when the rains are abundant, canoes loaded with cacao pass from sea
to sea. This interior communication has existed since 1788, unknown in Europe…”

When
Humboldt recommended the Atrato River as a canal possibility, that part of the
Darien region had lain dormant for more than 200 years. The famous explorers,
notably Bastide and de la Cosa and Christopher Columbus, did not get as far as
the Gulf of Uraba, so it is a mystery how it appeared in the Cantino.

When Philip
II ascended the Spanish throne in 1555, he immediately reversed the policy on
transit rights across the isthmus. Since the Atrato was a very good canal
channel, being more than 1000 feet wide and 50 feet deep as far as 60 miles
upstream, navigation on the river was forbidden under penalty of death, thus
effectively sealing both river, the route to the Pacific, and the knowledge of
both, to the outside world for many hundred of years.

Digging
deeper into the accounts of the curé of the village of Novita, reveals that the
monk, assiduous and shrewd as he was, did not build a new canal but dug out an
existing one. Evidence for this comes from a fascinating book The Golden
Isthmus by David Howarth, who actually discovered the Raspadura Canal. As
Howarth points out, possibly the canal was very much more ancient and had only
been reopened by the curé – for there was the sentence Humboldt’s predecessor,
Patterson, had written when on the Atrato: “We have only eight or nine leagues
to a river where boats may go into the south seas”. Somebody had told
Patterson, and in those early days it was not a story that anyone would have
invented. As David Howarth wrote:
On the whole, it seems likely there was a canal, or had been. Possibly it was
built by the Indians in an earlier epoch: they had been quite capable of it. Or
possibly it was a Spanish smuggling route: not only cocoa but gold and silver
might have been taken that way to avoid the duty – and perhaps the awkward
questions – of officials at Panama. . . . The problem awaits an explorer.

At the time
of the 1421-23 voyages, the Chinese had had centuries of experience in building
canals. And to build one to link the Atlantic to the Pacific across the whole
of the Darien peninsula would have been no problem at all, let alone the five
miles or so to connect the Atrato with the San Juan river. The Grand Canal of
China was begun under the Wu dynasty and was one of the wonders of the ancient
world.

From 584 AD
onwards it was extended and the individual sections linked together to form a
system stretching for 1800 kilometres, to this day the longest man-made
waterway in the world. It was the main artery of commerce between north and
south China. In 1411 the Emperor Zhu Di decided to dredge and reconstruct the
northern section to clear 130 miles of channel. Thirty-six new locks were built
for Beijing was over 100 feet higher than the Yellow River. Three hundred
thousand labourers were employed on the task. The completed canal stretched
from Beijing in the north to Hang Zhu on the coast south of Shanghai. By 1416,
300 million kilograms of grain were being ferried along the canal from south to
north to feed the workers in Beijing.

The Chinese
had a great deal to gain from a canal which linked Atlantic and Pacific, and
perhaps even more important, North America to South America – to this day there
is no road which connects the two continents. Apart from connecting the oceans
and continents, it would enable the Chinese to export the extraordinary wealth
of plants, especially medicinal ones, found in the Darien peninsula. The Darien
peninsula is a pantry for the world of medicinal raw materials, providing the
world’s pharmacology industry with natural medicine. So much wood is being
carried down the Atrato today that thousands of indigenous people living in
communities along the banks of the river are working together in a desperate
bid to save their forest.

The
scientist Alwyn Gentry describes the Choco jungle as “the richest in the world
in terms of vegetation species”. There is an incredible number of tree species
growing together in a single area. The medicinal plants will have been of
particular interest to the Chinese as McKay Rippey has pointed out on our
website:

“… Chinese
medicine, one of the unequivocal jewels of Chinese civilisation, is based on a
brilliant insight into how human beings fit into nature’s web. Chinese medicine
is as viable today as it was two thousand years ago. One major facet of Chinese
medicine is herbology. The Chinese herbal pharmacopoeia draws upon the
many plants and animal products indigenous to China and surrounding regions. In
addition to local herbs, the Chinese include substances that can only have come
from overseas. Chinese physicians and herbalists would have carried their knowledge
and herbs with them on a voyage such as proposed in 1421…”
Mr Rippey then goes on to describe herbs that clearly originated in the
Americas (i.e. corn cob) are highly regarded by native American cultures and
would likely to have been the subject of trade and curiosity between
herbalists. They are now grown in both Asia and America and we might have the
Chinese to thank for propagating them.

Mr Rippey
then lists them: Corn cob and corn silk (yumixu) native to the Americas both
found in China by early European explorers; American ginseng originally grown
only in the north east United States – this form of ginseng is highly prized by
Chinese herbalists because it is a kidney yin tonifier; Chinese reishi (ling
zhi) a native of north Florida and China; horny goatweed (yang huo cao/jin yang
huo); epidemium – Chinese and native American herbalism; versicolor mushroom
(turkey tail) kawaratake yung-zhi (cloud fungus) again used in Chinese and
native American herbalism. Plants are used for colds and ‘flu and other
infections; they were named “herb of the saints” by Catholic missionaries in
California and much valued by west coast native Americans; it is likely
they would have been part of the trade between Chinese explorers and native
Americans.

We have been
extremely lucky in being informed by readers of my book and visitors to our
website of the Complete Herb Book of China which was printed in 1503. This was
a huge encyclopaedia of all the plants known to China – contained in no less
than four hundred and three volumes. It lists a vast number of plants which
were native to the Americas – such as peanuts. The book was originally written
by imperial officials under the order of the Ming dynasty Xiao Zhong Emperor.
The first missionaries to China found peanuts all over the country so they were
certainly introduced to China long before Columbus landed in America. The
obvious question is, how could this Chinese book published in 1503 have listed
so many plants, medicinal and otherwise, indigenous to the Americas if the
Chinese had not already been to the Americas?

I have had
the enormous good fortune to visit the South American rainforest on a tributary
of the Amazon. We arrived in lowering cloud and scudding rain in a shanty town
on the confluence of the Tambobata and Madre de Dios Rivers, a wild west
frontier settlement. The place was almost inaccessible save by air, the truck
journey took four days in the dry season, three weeks in the wet. As we
arrived, El Niño’s floods had washed away the bridges so the road was impassable.
We hired rickety old trishaws and soon had reached the ramshackle harbour and
were sailing in a canoe down the green clear waters of the Madre de Dios River.
In an hour or so we were amidst virgin jungle, the banks dominated by Brazil
nut trees the size of beeches. On the exposed sandbanks, sluggish white caymans
snored in the sun oblivious as we photographed them. It became overcast and
soon a warm leaden rain was splashing off the oily river. The monotony of the
jungle, silent but menacing, induced a trance. We sat hypnotised for hours on
end as the endless river glided dreamily past the oily, glistening banks.

We stayed
with an Indian people who cultivated small plots near the river’s edge. They
fished from the Tambopata River and hunted birds and game in the forest – deer,
peccary and monkeys. The river used to be rich in fish with more than four
hundred species from minnows to monster paiche weighing up to four hundred
kilograms, the world’s largest fresh water fish. The Indian peoples enjoyed a
huge variety of medicinal plants, edible fruits and nuts; provided the jungle
ecosystem was left undisturbed, food was plentiful and easy to come by, the
people of the rainforest healthy and they made few demands on the outside
world. A stones throw from our hut, the people had created a garden in which
there were over one hundred medicinal plants varying in size from the oje at 70
feet to the guisador, a small ground shrub.

The peoples
of the rain forest used 90 per cent of her wealth for some purpose or other –
hallucinogens used by hunters to make themselves invisible. They used gum from
the trees as latex and her wood for canoes and houses, bows and arrows, and the
leaves as palm for thatch and for an endless variety of medicinal purposes, as
vegetables and fruits, stimulants and sedatives, aphrodisiacs, soaps, tobacco,
for all manner of drinks and vitamin additives. Pinon blanco, the roots of the
chic sanangon, are used for purges. Many remedies are available against
diarrhoea – the young tender leaves of the cachu tree mixed with salt and sugar
is an effective remedy against dehydration.

All sorts of
remedies are available to cleanse the blood – café, a concoction of leaves,
quoin, ginger root, or the bark of the puna tree. Interestingly, this bark is now
being tested in the USA to discover whether, as claimed, it attacks the Aids
virus. Shinto vari leaves cure snake bites. Abscesses are treated with leaves
of the prickly pear, gergon sasha. Piri bulbs soothe strained muscles. The
latex from sangi degrada relieves toothache and stomach pains. The crushed
roots of beri beri have anti-inflammatory properties. In short, this fabulously
rich rainforest has a diversity of trees, which may be used for every purpose
imaginable.

Tall balsa
trees provide the lightest wood known to man – density 0.21, soft and porous
yet solid. At the other end of the scale is lignum vitae, its greenish brown
heartwood seven times as heavy as balsa. In between come all manner of woods
and canes, flexible for bamboos and cane furniture, high tensile for bows, hard
and light for arrows.

Equally rich
is the variety of fruit – piled up outside our hut are wild bananas, mangoes
and custard apples. We eat yuccas as a delicious alternative to bread and
potatoes. Climbing marrows and squashes come in all shapes and colours, cooking
oil being extracted from their seeds. Beverages of all types and tastes can be
extracted from jungle berries. Cocoa, whose beans are fermented to develop
their flavour contain 50 per cent of fat (cocoa butter) and caffeine, a
stimulant. Roasted and ground they make chocolate to which sugar and vanilla
are added. To this day, caucho masha, a sap resembling milk, is used for baby
food and as a tonic when sweetened by sugar cane. Herba louisa – lemon grass, a
common herb, is used today for Incacola, the popular equivalent Coca Cola sold
throughout South America.

Before
setting out on that adventure I had imagined jungle life would be a battle for
survival. When seen at first hand, the richness of the rainforest explains what
had hitherto been incomprehensible – that the Indian peoples when their habitat
is undisturbed need only hunt a few days each month. They may live a perfectly
healthy, comfortable and well-fed existence by fishing, gathering fruits, roots
and vegetables from the jungle; if they fall ill, they can apply remedies
derived from the trees and shrubs that grow so abundantly round them. Not
without reason did the Chinese wish to exploit the incredible richness of the
Darien peninsula. As will be described in another talk, many of her richness
were exported by the Chinese to New Zealand where to this day they are used in
Maori healing and herbal medicines and practices.

So the canal
would have made absolute sense to the Chinese. They could use it to bring out
the cornucopia of wealth from the rainforest to either the Atlantic or Pacific
coasts. They could use it to tranship Chinese goods from the Pacific to the
Caribbean; North American maize to China; South American cocoa to North
America. They could obtain water in abundance, all manner of wood for their
ships – no wonder the Darien peninsula became of pivotal importance in the
great Chinese concept of bringing all of the worlds into Confucian harmony.

The First Suez Canal

From “the windows of the world” bar atop the Ramses Hilton on the banks of the
Nile one
is directly above the mediaeval harbour of Cairo. In 1421 a fleet of feluccas,
barges and dhows would be unloading their cargoes beneath us – wheat came
downstream from the Sudan; Venetian glass was carried upriver; pitiful slaves
arrived on the trade winds from Zanzibar; Chinese junks with silk and porcelain
sailed down the Red Sea-Nile canal; gold caravans plodded forty days from Mali.
In 1421 Cairo was still the world’s biggest port outside China; on a normal day
two thousand ships would unload, twenty times the traffic of Bruges, Europe’s
busiest.

The artery,
which pumped wealth into the heart of Cairo is clearly visible from this
splendid bar. The mighty Nile sweeps in a majestic arc round the hotel out of
the heart of Africa, even today carrying dhows, water and silk to the delta – a
green smudge to the north. To the west the Sahara stretches to the Atlantic,
the setting sun glints off the sides of the pyramids. For the five thousand
years from the pharaohs to the British the Nile has been Egypt’s lifeblood, the
source of her fabulous wealth. To the east from the foot of the hotel a green
ribbon stretches to the horizon criss-crossed now and then by roads and
railways. Below this green line lie the remains of the Red Sea-Nile canal,
which as its name implies, connected the mighty river with the Red Sea and the
East. It was filled in when the Suez canal was built.

The canal
had first been built by the pharaohs, it then silted up but was dug out once
again by the Romans and then, after their empire fell, against fell into
disuse. The first Fatamid caliph, Al Muiz, whose name still graces the main
street of mediaeval Cairo, had invested his own fortune in taking the city. He
wanted to recoup his money as fast as possible and the Red Sea-Nile canal was
his vehicle to do so. Muiz had it dredged and widened; he organised a new
port and customs headquarters where the canal met the Nile north of Al Kahira,
the site of today’s Ramases Hilton. He built a fleet of six hundred
merchant ships, 275 feet long and 100 feet in the beam – a colossal size for
those days, fifty times larger than the cogs, which then plied the North
Sea. Muiz’s barges with the equivalent of supertankers built for carrying
grain down the Nile. With the canal reopened, seaborne trade flourished.

Huge junks
could now carry silk and porcelain from China across the Indian Ocean on the
free power of the monsoons. They sailed into the Red Sea, thence along the Red
Sea canal to Cairo where they met the Nile to continue downstream to the
Mediterranean. Goods could now be shipped direct from Beijing to Venice, from
the heart of Africa to China, from the Malabar Coast of India to Cairo and
beyond. Spices could be carried direct from the Spice Islands to Mediterranean
ports. We know that Zheng He’s fleets passed through this great canal into the
Mediterranean and west Spain for the Ming Shi (History of the Ming Dynasty)
states that in 1408 his fleet visited Misr [Cairo], Mulanpi, Kelin and other
places.

Mulanpi is
the Kingdom of Al Muribitum or Al Moravid Berber dynasty which ruled
Spain. In their reports the Chinese give the correct dates of
rulers of the Al Mamoud dynasty and they describe Mount Etna erupting when they
sailed south of Sicily en route west to Spain. Today, Spanish gypsies of
the south of Spain have DNA, which is far closer to Chinese than to the
Europeans or Moors who live around them.

It is
curious to think that what are considered two of the greatest European
engineering feats of all time, the Suez canal and the Panama canal, were
replacements of canals that had been built hundreds, and in the case of Suez
canal, thousands of years earlier. It is equally curious that this fact goes
unnoticed in European histories of exploration.

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